Liberia awaits experimental drug for Ebola

No available cure or vaccine for virus, while death toll reaches 1,013

Liberia was awaiting on Tuesday the delivery of an experimental drug to treat Ebola patients as the World Health Organization debated the use of such treatments and announced the global death toll for the virus has topped 1,000.

Liberia, one of the countries hardest hit by the killer virus, said it had requested samples of an experimental drug and that supplies would be brought into the country "by a representative of the US government" later this week.

There is currently no available cure or vaccine for Ebola, which the WHO has declared a global public health emergency.

The deadly outbreak has until now been limited to Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, all in west Africa where ill-equipped and fragile health systems are struggling to cope.

But countries around the world are taking measures to prevent the tropical disease reaching their shores.

The WHO has scrambled to draft guidelines for the use of experimental medicines at a meeting in Geneva and is to present its conclusions on Tuesday.

The use of an experimental drug called ZMapp on two US citizens and a Spanish priest infected with the virus while working in Africa has opened up an intense ethical debate.

The drug, made by private US company Mapp Pharmaceuticals, has shown promising results but is still in an early phase of development and had only been tested previously on monkeys.

Ethical thing to do?

ZMapp is in very short supply, but its use on Western aid workers has sparked controversy and demands that it be made available in Africa.

"Is it ethical to use unregistered medicines to treat people, and if so, what criteria should they meet, and what conditions, and who should be treated?" WHO Assistant Director-General Marie-Paule Kieny said ahead of Monday's meeting.

"What is the ethical thing to do?"

Mapp Pharmaceuticals said it had sent all its available supplies to West Africa.

"In responding to the request received this weekend from a West African nation, the available supply of ZMapp is exhausted," it said in a statement.

"Any decision to use ZMapp must be made by the patients' medical team," it said, adding that the drug was "provided at no cost in all cases".

The company did not reveal which nation received the doses, or how many were sent, but Liberia said it had requested samples that would "be brought in to the country by a representative of the US government later this week".

"The White House and the United States Food and Drug Administration have approved the request for sample doses of experimental serum to treat Liberian doctors who are currently infected with the deadly Ebola virus disease," the Liberian presidency said.

'Everyone is afraid'

The disease has killed 1,013 people this year, according to the latest figures from the WHO, which says it is the worst outbreak since Ebola was discovered four decades ago.

In Liberia - where Ebola has already claimed more than 300 lives - a third province, Lofa, was placed under quarantine on Monday after similar measures in Bomba and Grand Cape Mount.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf also banned state officials from traveling abroad for a month and ordered those outside the country to return home within a week.

In the latest such move, Cote d'Ivoire has announced on Monday that it was banning all flights from the three hardest-hit nations.

(China Daily 08/13/2014 page12)